PARIS OLYMPIC GAMES
In recognition of his outstanding contributions to agriculture and agribusiness in the country, the Managing Director/CEO of the Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL Plc), Aliyu Abdulhameed, has emerged winner of the CEO Today Magazine Global Award 2021.
CEO Today Magazine identifies and honours the most respected companies and their C-Level executives who lead the way for others on a global stage.
According to the magazine, the 2021 awards are special because they recognize CEOs who, despite the odds occasioned by the Coronavirus pandemic, successfully executed their corporate strategies and programmes.
In its flagship publication, CEO Today highlights NIRSAL Plc’s innovations, achievements and plans under Abdulhameed’s leadership as exemplary and worthy of recognition.
“Innovations that have been introduced to the Nigerian agriculture sector as a result of Abdulhameed’s leadership at NIRSAL Plc include the creation of the NIRSAL Agro Geo-Cooperative® (AGC) concept which structures farmers, aggregates their farmlands into contiguous stretches of 250 hectares each and links them with training, inputs, mechanization, financing and produce buyers’’
“Others include the creation & mapping of Agricultural Commodity Ecological Areas (ACEAs); the development of the Mapping to Markets (M2M) strategy; the development of innovative index-based agricultural insurance products; the introduction of comprehensive field monitoring by remote sensing satellite systems and granular validation by UAS platforms; and the development of the Secured Agricultural Commodity Transport & Storage Corridor (SATS-C) model to address logistical inefficiencies in the agricultural value chain in Nigeria’’
Some of the innovations that have been introduced to the Nigerian agriculture sector as a result of Abdulhameed’s leadership at NIRSAL Plc include the creation of the NIRSAL Agro Geo-Cooperative (AGC) concept which structures farmers, aggregates their farmlands into contiguous stretches of 250 hectares each and links them with training, inputs, mechanization, financing and produce buyers.
Others include the creation & mapping of Agricultural Commodity Ecological Areas (ACEAs); the development of the Mapping to Markets (M2M) strategy; the development of innovative index-based agricultural insurance products; the introduction of comprehensive field monitoring by remote sensing satellite systems and granular validation by UAS platforms; and the development of the Secured Agricultural Commodity Transport & Storage Corridor (SATS-C) model to address logistical inefficiencies in the agricultural value chain in Nigeria.
Among NIRSAL Plc’s achievements that enhanced CEO Today’s reckoning of the institution and its CEO, Abdulhameed, is the facilitation of over US$550 million to various actors across Agricultural Value Chains for mechanisation activities, input distribution, and the production, processing, trading and marketing of agricultural commodities.
Owing to NIRSAL Plc’s solutions, commercial banks have pledged to provide an additional US$500 million to fund agriculture in the short to medium-term, provided the NIRSAL Credit Risk Guarantee (CRG) and its structured Agro Geo-Cooperatives® remain in place. It is an indication that financiers are growing more and more confident in lending to agriculture. This claim is made true by the remarkable growth in the rate of bank lending to agriculture, from 1.4% pre-NIRSAL to 4.8% as ofQ3 2020.
Other milestone achievements of NIRSAL include:
§ A 123.5% increase in insurance uptake amongst smallholder farmers since NIRSAL led the development and deployment of index-based insurance products.
§ 3,023 Agro Geo-Cooperatives® (AGCs) covering over 700,000 hectares of farmland formed, operated by an estimated 400,000 smallholder farmers. This is in pursuit of a short to medium-term target of 4million hectares, 16,000 AGCs, and 8million smallholder farmers.
§ 700,000 farmers trained on good agronomic practices and financial literacy, with NIRSAL’s CRG beneficiaries attesting to a 20-60% increase in capacity utilisation, productivity/output levels, number of markets served and sales value.
§ An estimated US$2.3 billion worth of economic activities stirred through agricultural products/outputs by virtue of NIRSAL Plc’s interventions across agricultural value chains.
Describing the honour as a big surprise, Abdulhameed, said it would serve as a motivation in his quest to bring about more positive changes in agriculture in Nigeria through his position.
He said NIRSAL’s strict adherence to global best practices has proven to be effective given CEO Today’s recognition and award.
CEO Today collates votes and carries out in-depth sector by sector research to choose the very best among the world’s CEOs to reward and celebrate theirleadership style and visionary impetus.
Winners of this year’s global awards come from the academia, tech, e-commerce, public administration and more from several countries including the UAE, Germany, USA, Sweden, Bulgaria and China.
The President and CEO of Higher Colleges of Technology, UAE, Dr. Abdullatif Al Shamsi, made the final shortlist for meticulously and consistently providing a smooth, enjoyable and successful journey to students of the institution from admission to employment. Some of the other awardees include Michael Lampel of QOOPER Media & Michael Lampel Consulting, Germany; Ruain Kelleher of Immedis in Ireland; Kan Shi of Cue Group in China, and Sara Spencer of SolonTek in the USA.
It is this esteemed company of global tech, real estate, financial services and academic giants that Aliyu Abdulhameed, an agribusiness enthusiast and promoter, has now joined by winning CEO Today’s global award.
It is a pointer to NIRSAL Plc’s popularity, and the growing modernization of agriculture and agribusiness in Nigeria.
CEO Today’s Hall of Fame is filled with the leading lights of the global economy, from the real estate mogul, Dr. Anas Hasan Al-Mulla, to tech innovators, Yuichi Ishizuka and Nick Lazaridis of Canon and EMEA/HP respectively. The CEO of Barclays UK, Ashok Vaswani, is also present, along with Cormac Whelan, CEO of Nokia UK and Ireland.
Aliyu Abdulhameed’s biodata
Persecondnews peeked into pioneer Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of the NIRSAL Plc, Aliyu Abdulhameed’s biodata online and from Wikipedia, describing him as an iconic and multi-talented Agricultural Economist who has a rich experience in Institutional Development, Programme Management, and Process Development and Improvement.
An alumnus of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Abdulhameed has a Bachelor of Science degree in Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology and a Master’s degree in Public Administration (with specialization in Public Policy).He also boasts of another Master’s degree in Public Administration with specialization in Public Policy from the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA) as well as an Executive Masters Certificate in Project Management from the Project Management College, United Kingdom.
Before he came on board, Abdulhameed had served as Executive Team member of NIRSAL when it was a Project Office under the Development Finance Department of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
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With a career spanning over 22 years, Aliyu has acquired deep and hands-on experience in important sectors of the emerging African agriculture economy. For instance, as a staff of Kewalrams Afcot Group, pioneer backward integrators in the Cotton Textile Garment (CTG) value chain, he was part of the team that was instrumental to the creation of Olam, the no 1 global commodity trader which links end to end value chains from primary production to industrial users of globally traded agric commodities.
Having a rich blend of formal learning, passion, research, and hands-on experience in both the private and public sectors of the Nigerian economy, the CEO has become one of the foremost agribusiness advocates in Nigeria and Africa.
His multi-sectoral stint includes consultancy services, commercial agricultural production, and processing, commodity marketing, input management, agricultural extension services, transportation, and logistics.
Through a blend of technical competence, result-focused leadership, and passionate advocacy, he has energized the institution and achieved important initial milestones which have provided a strong foundation for realizing NIRSAL’s unique vision of transforming the agriculture sector through de-risking the agricultural value chain.
A relentless campaigner for the use of technology to drive agriculture in Africa, Abdulhameed’s dexterous leadership has, no doubt, put NIRSAL in the continental limelight.
Under his watch, NIRSAL has attracted the positive attention of respected global players in the agriculture sector including the African Development Bank (ADB), United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), and United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) and other African countries like Rwanda, Liberia, etc.
His fame has gone abroad with several countries in Africa understudying and adopting the NIRSAL model to continue the chain of agricultural development across the continent.
A fellow of numerous professional associations including the Microfinance Association of the United Kingdom, the Institute of Credit Administration (ICA) in Nigeria, Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply Management of Nigeria (CIPSMN), Abdulhameed is a distinguished member of the Nigerian Institute of Management (NIM) and senior associate member of the Risk Managers Association of Nigeria (RIMAN), and an Honorary Member of the Chartered Institute of Bankers of Nigeria (CIBN).
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